A “DVM network” is a broadcast network within the hardware/software architecture of a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed to broadcast “DVM operations” from a “DVM initiator” to all “DVM targets” of the DVM network. The DVM network is responsible for merging responses from the DVM targets and presenting a single unified response back to the DVM initiator. DVM operations may include translation lookaside buffer (TLB) invalidate operations to TLBs located at a DVM target, synchronization operations to ensure completion of previous DVM operations, instruction cache invalidate operations to instruction caches located at a DVM target, and other related operations.
DVM networks use a protocol based on the Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) 4 Advanced Extensible Interface (AXI) Coherency Extensions (ACE) standard from ARM Ltd. AMBA 4 is an open-standard, on-chip interconnect specification for the connection and management of functional blocks in SoC designs. The standard specification only describes the “protocol” for DVM networks and does not mandate a specific implementation of the DVM network.